There is a thread in the Apple Developer Forums (only accessible via login to registered developers) in which many publishers are venting their frustrations – with one quantifying their losses so far at over $10,000.

As for Oz Weather, the strategy of reverting the app price back to the discounted level seems to have worked. Sales started again almost immediately – purchases were no longer being blocked. Yesterday 415 units were sold, up from the low of 17 units after I attempted to change the price, and the app ranking rose back to #2 paid app in the Australian app store, up from its low of #23. But of course now the app price is stuck at the discounted level – if I want to have any sales at all that is!

It seems likely to me that the reason users were being blocked from buying was due to mismatch between the price cached on the user’s machine/iphone and the price on the purchase server. So when I re-lowered the price, the mismatch no longer occured. It seems that a major de-synchronisation has occured between different components in Apple’s app store system.

Right now, the Oz Weather app description that users are seeing is still the one I had with an Xmas Sale message in it. Once this decription gets updated to the correct, more recent one, I might be willing to risk raising the price again. Also, the number of reviews has been static for about 10 days, despite high sales over Xmas. So watching for when the number of reviews suddenly jumps up with all those missing reviews may be another sign to look for to show that the problem is being resolved.

My advice to other publishers? Don’t make any app changes via iTunes Connect until this problem is resolved – unless it is perhaps to try some harmless subtle text change to your app’s description so that you can test whether or not the update actually filters through the system to the app store.

6 thoughts on “Broken App Store – Update”

You can see the number of missing reviews by looking at the app store on the iPhone. When an app is in a list you see a different (probably correct) number of reviews. For OzWeather this is 126, when you drill down to the app information page the review total is now 94. That’s 32 missing reviews.

However I do think the average rating is reflective of the total reviews as our kids game Moo Shake! has 7 reviews on the details page which should give it an average rating of around 4.5/5 but the average rating is 4/5 – which means that the missing 3 reviews (there is 10 total reviews in the listing screen) are probably 4/5 or 3/5.

Until yesterday Oz Weather reviews showed around 107 outside and 77 inside the app page. (Now jumped to 126 and 94). So there is always a disparity, even when the servers re-sync. Some think that this disparity reflects users who rate upon app deletion (a newish app store feature). Supposedly we never get to see the rate-on-delete reviews, but the scores given are reflected in the overall average displayed for the app. There is presumably some (Apple) logic to this all – just a bit hard to get to grips with!

Hi guys, I know what “missing reviews” are. I live in Spain so my locale on my iphone is “spain”. When I view an app in the app store it will say 100 reviews, but I will only be able to see a few if any. It is because most of the reviews are not in the language of my locale. I only get shown spanish reviews, which is frustrating.